Mick Hartley

An interesting take here from David Patrikarakos, on the increasingly hard-line being taken by Tehran: 

On July 20, 1988, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, finally accepted UN Resolution 598 calling for a ceasefire to the eight-year long war with Iraq. Khomeini was distraught. “Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom. Happy are those who have lost their lives in this convoy of light,” he said. “Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice.”

For Khomeini, agreeing to a ceasefire was as bitter as drinking poison. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had started the war by invading Iran on September 22, 1980, and Khomeini had promised to crush its forces. In the end, he had to settle for a draw. It was an almost unpardonable sign of weakness.

Something had to be done, and it was. The Iranian regime began, en masse, to slaughter political prisoners held in its jails. The killings continued for five months. Most of the victims were members of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group that had fought with Saddam against Iran during the war. Just six days after the ceasefire, on July 26, Iran had repelled a final incursion from Iraq consisting of around 7,000 MEK fighters, and many thought the killings were done partly in revenge.

But many members of other opposition groups, including the Fedaian and the Tudeh (Communist) Parties, were executed as well. The numbers of those killed range from 4,500 to around 30,000. It was a purge unprecedented in Iran’s modern history. The regime was sending a clear message: we may have come to agreement with Iraq but we remain steadfast. Compromise had only made the Islamic Republic more determined to reassert its most fundamentalist self.

Just over 25 years later, the Islamic Republic of Iran was forced to compromise once again when, after more than a decade of negotiations, the crisis over its nuclear program was brought to a resolution of sorts with the deal agreed between Iran and the P5+1 (the five UN Security Council powers and Germany) on July 14, 2014. The so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was a complex deal and the two sides spent months haggling over technicalities. But it essentially rested on cutting, as far as possible, Iran’s two paths to a nuclear bomb.

And so, history repeats itself. The apparent weakness implied by a deal – a compromise – with the hated Western powers, requires an increase in the hard-line rhetoric and policies, by way of compensation.

February 26, 2016 Iran will hold a round of parliamentary elections, at which point the constellation—and relative power of—political forces inside post-deal Iran will become even clearer. The Guardians Council has already blocked 99 percent of the 3,000 reformist candidates on offer. Since the JCPOA, Iran has not progressed but regressed.

As 2016 dawned Iranian officials were, if anything, even more defiant than in recent months. On January 1 at Friday prayers, Brigadier General Hossein Salami, the IRGC’s second-in-command, announced that Iran would expand its missile capabilities. “We don’t have enough space to store our missiles. All our depots and underground facilities are full,” he boasted.

Salami’s statement was pointed and calculated—as everything said at major Friday prayer sermons in Tehran always is. And it was merely the latest rhetorical broadside in what has been the unchanging Iranian message since the JCPOA was unveiled on July 14 last year: The post-deal Islamic Republic is going to be harder to handle. The world had better get used to that.